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Australian prime minister Julia Gillard has won a leadership stoush among Labor MPs in Canberra, cementing her position as a squawking harridan in charge of the distant colony.

Ms Gillard clobbered the Foreign Minister, Kevin Rudd, who had the flamin gall to launch a leadership bid after walking right out of the bloody Cabinet, would you believe. ‘Jeez, I’m mad as a cut snake with that bastard,’ Gillard squawked after she stonkered the poor bloke by 71 votes to 31 at a meeting of the Labor parliamentary caucus. ‘Still, I got me a bleedin’ ripsnorter of a result, and now I’m gettin on with the biznis of gavernment.’

Gillard denied that her public persona had damaged her chances of winning the next election against Opposition leader Tony Abbott, widely seen as a ripper larrikin. ‘It’s London to a brick that we’ll woip the floor with those bastards at the nixt eliction,’ insisted Gillard. She became the first sheila to serve as prime minister when she ousted Rudd in 2010, after low poll ratings indicated that the public considered him about as useful as tits on a bull.

Rudd was gracious in defeat. ‘Fair dinkum, she put in the yakka and she whackered me good and proper, the tin-arsed jillaroo,’ he said in a dignified concession speech. ‘Oi’m going out tonight to hit the turps, and then when Oi’ve sobered up Oi’ll rack off to the backbenches and let her give it a burl.’

Latest polls suggest that Labor is losing ground to the Opposition, and Ms Gillard’s main challenge is to rebuild her popularity among the middle classes, as well as her core vote of sheilas and cobbers who haven’t got a brass razoo.